Closet Extremist

Twitch

Had a pretty-decent night on the job, so that's something. We did have one little snag that cost us about two hours worth of work though. Just to clarify, we've actually not been replacing ropes on this job yet. What is getting done, is we are having the "Drive (or traction)" shieves re-ground on all three of the elevators in this "bank" (Not a financial institution, but a group of elevators that work in conjunction with one another). In order for us to be able to do that, we have to take the ropes that are there and move them out of the way, so that the guy can get his lathe in there. No big whoop.

We had gotten started on rigging up the right-side elevator (We did the one in the middle on Sunday night) when we realized that there was no way we could pull then through the drive shieve due to the "shackles". A shackle is a piece of threaded rod that has a means of being attached to the rope, and then stuck through a hole in the floor (or a mounting plate) and nuts are placed on the end of it to hold it in place. Nowadays, we are using a "Wedge Type" shackle that is exactly what it sounds like. There is a little V-shaped basket with a hole in the bottom. The rope comes up through the bottom of the V, is turned in a loop, and then passed back through the hole again. A Little wedge is inserted into the loop, and then you pull both ends of the rope until the wedge buries itself into the basket. The weight of the elevator pinches the rope inside the basket and the wedge keeps it from moving. Simple design, and the best part is that you can take it apart and reuse it.

What we found was that the shackles on the car we started on were "Old School". These go together a little differently. Think of an inverted cone with a hole at the pointy end. The hole is only just big enough to pass the rope through it one time. Once the end is stuck up through there, the rope is unravelled just a little bit. Each one of the strands is then bent away and down, to form a mushroom shape. Then the mushroom is pulled down into the cone. Since this is not enough to keep the rope from pulling through the hole, "Babbitt" is used to hold it in place. Babbitt is a kind of lead (and some other metals) that is melted into a liquid, and then poured into the top of the cone. Once it hardens, it is well-nigh impossible to get back out of there, so you can see our delimma. In order to get the ropes through the machine we would have to cut the ropes off of the shackles, and we had no spare "wedge-type" shackles to replacethe babbitted ones, so we were stuck. Luckily, the car on the left had wedge-typed shackles on it, so we just moved over there and did our thing.

When I finally got home last night (aka this morning), the BAD SHIT started. I went to sit down at my computer, and noticed a high-pitched whine was emanating from the nether-regions of my PC. Grab the mouse, to wake it up, and get no response. I tried hugging it, tickling it, screaming at it, and hitting it with a sawed-off pool cue, to no avail. My power supply has gone to the big scrap-heap in the sky. "No problem" is says to myself. My roommate's have some more PC's in the house, so I'll just use one of them. Much to my chagrin, I find that the cable-modem is down. Arrrrghh! Seven computer's in this house, and I can't get to the web from any one of them.

Thank goodness, that the network is back up this morning, as I'd hate to think of what may have happenned if it weren't. The scenario "Up on a roof with a Magnum" springs to mind. Well, I'm off to try to get another power supply for my machine, and I'll keep you guy's posted. It's a good thing I ain't addicted to the Internet. I can quit any time I want.

Twitch

Posted by Johnny - Oh at March 8, 2005 01:24 PM